I tried that. It doesn't work.
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How can Christianity and Judaism both exist?
- Thread starter nnmartin
- Start date
I tried that. It doesn't work.
Averroes
Active Member
I am confused.
Christianity claims that Christ was the Son of God and that this is the only true path to follow.
Judaism does not recognise Jesus as being the Son yet the Jews are the chosen people.
Both religions share the same God - therefore one religion must be wrong, right?
This is like some kind of religious paradox.
I apologize for Jayhawk who, from personal experience can be quite "frank" and I alao apologize if no other Jewish believer offered an in-depth response other than Levite.
I am neither Jewish nor Christian so I cannot give you my perspective on both but a good guess of mine to at least throw my two cents in, is that Christianity and Judaism at least historically have some relationship with each other. Theology wise I will steal the line Levite used in another thread:
"Christianity [like Hinduism] practices a form of indirect monotheism"-Levite
I would same the same God yes cause its the same God out of the Bible. Where they differ is Jesus. From what I read from Jewish sources (and fellow jews correct me if I am wrong) the main thing that separates Messianic Christianity from that of Judaism is that Jews believe when the messiah comes, there will be world peace. In addition, the Messiah will come only once, Jesus in Christian theology will be coming back twice.
I still believe Christianity and Judaism still holds a bonding relationship. If you ask a simple question such as "do you believe in the God of Abraham" to a jew, christian, and muslim they would all say "yes"
Villager
Active Member
Only two of them with evidence, though.
Averroes
Active Member
Gjallarhorn
N'yog-Sothep
Have a little faith.
Flankerl
Well-Known Member
Oh dont even ask.
Villager
Active Member
So Jews have no evidence for their belief?
outhouse
Atheistically
strikeviperMKII
Well-Known Member
That'd be the point.
Kilgore Trout
Misanthropic Humanist
Oh my god - there are people who are Yankees fans, and there are people who are Red Sox fans! How can each baseball team possibly have fans??? The implications of this mind-bending paradox are astounding! My head is going to explode!
Christianity claims that Christ was the Son of God and that this is the only true path to follow.
Judaism does not recognise Jesus as being the Son yet the Jews are the chosen people.
Both religions share the same God - therefore one religion must be wrong, right?
This is like some kind of religious paradox.
Some Christians are known to accept that Judism works too. Those of Jewish faith just have chosen the hard way to God. While Chirtians have taken the short cut the Jesus offered.
Ya see God setup a covenant with the Hebrews. Show your faith by obaying My (God's) laws and you get salvation. Then Jesus came along and offered new terms, show your faith by repenting your sins and asking for forgivness, then because of your Faith in Me (Jesus), I'll (Jesus) grant you salvation.
Note: I'm not saying I believe this, just pointing out some theories out there.
Personally I sugggest that the works assiciated with the OT people were not the true path to salvation but rather those actions were evidence of the same Faith we Christians are called to.
No paradox - Yankee fans are not real people.
Villager
Active Member
Some antichrists might say so.
Levite
Higher and Higher
The Perushim (Pharisees) would not have accepted Jesus' claim to be the messiah, as his teachings contravened Pharisaic understanding of Torah. It is unlikely that the priests would have accepted Jesus' claim, both because the priests at that time were Tzedokim (Saduccees), whose understanding of messiahdom was even more limited and political than the Perushi definition of messiahdom, and because Jesus, much like the Perushim, was a ritual populist, who favored increasing home and community based religious ritual.
The majority of Jews did not accept Jesus' claim to be the messiah, simply beacuse the majority of Jews had likely never heard of Jesus. There were hundreds of guys running around in those days claiming to be the messiah. There would have been nothing to mark this particular one out as special for the Jewish People to notice him, especially since he failed to do the things that the messiah is supposed to do. Most Jews only began to hear anything about Jesus a couple of hundred years after he was killed, when Christian religion began to be an established thing, and the Christian establishment began encouraging the persecution of Jews by the Roman authorities.
Also, no Jew ever need prove wrong Jesus' claims. Anyone's claim to be the messiah is judged upon whether they fulfilled the actions that the messiah is said to be fated to do. Jesus did not free the Jewish People from non-Jewish rule and non-Jewish persecution. He did not return the kingship of the Jewish People to the House of David. He did not bring about a return of Exiles back to the Land of Israel. He did not lead the Jewish People back to a more heartfelt observance of the covenant. In fact, following his short life, the Exile increased, the persecution of the Jews worsened, the Temple was destroyed, and his teachings, especially as preached by his apostate followers, encourage believers in Jesus to break the covenant, and seek to count non-Jews among the membership of an "expanded" or "new" covenant-- ideas which are entirely against Torah. His so-called "messiahdom" could not have been a worse failure. The Christians only got around that fact by rewriting Jewish thought and theology, and redefining the meaning of messiahdom, until none of it resembled Judaism or Jewish messianism anymore.
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Villager
Active Member
The New Testament record, that was uncontested at the time of writing, is that Pharisees and priests joined the church.
Jews in Judea all knew about Jesus. Jews in cosmopolitan Galilee knew all about Jesus. Jews from furthest Persia to Africa to Spain, everywhere there were synagogues that held Jews who travelled to Jerusalem for festivals, heard of Jesus. The Roman Empire heard of Jesus, and banned the following of 'the Galilaean'. Every mother's son and his sister in the known world heard of Jesus. There are hundreds of contemporary phoney stories about Jesus or his followers, extant; and the total number must have been many more. A more implausible comment is hardly possible than that Jews had never heard of Jesus.
Maybe not. Who can say?
What anyone needs to do, if they wish to demonstrate that Christianity is not the authentic inheritance of Abraham, is show that the Christian interpretation of the OT is impermissible. That has never been done.
gnostic
The Lost One
nnmartin said:
I don't think it is that simple to decide which religion is right and which is wrong.
The teaching in Christianity is "right", within the confine or limits of its own religion. The same goes for Judaism and for Islam.
But if you look at the religion from my perspective (who don't belong to any of the Abrahamic religions), both Christianity and Islam have redefined the Hebrew scriptures and the teachings in Judaism to something new and different, to suit their own respective agenda, bearing very little relation and resemblance to the Judaism that had originally come from Moses.
If anything, Christianity (and Islam indirectly, which I will explain a lot more later), have a lot of teaching that is foreign to Judaism, in particular about Judgement and the Afterlife. Christianity resembled a lot more to the pagan teachings of the Persian and Hellenistic periods, deriving from religious teachings of Zoroastrianism (Persian), Greek mystery religions and Egyptian religion.
What I mean indirectly about Islam is that Islam borrowed many pagan concepts from Christianity, as well as directly from Zoroastrianism. There were also Christians and Jews living in the Arabian peninsula at that time, so I don't find it strange the Arabians inheriting some of the Christian and Jewish concepts of monotheism.
Anyway, I think the Christians have adopted and modified the older Judaic religion, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, and the Muslims were the same, but also borrowed Christian teachings, instead of inventing something new.
If you look at Celtic myth, in the Book of Invasions (Lebor Erinene), the writers of that time, borrowed the Flood myth from the Bible, stating that the Milesians, Tuatha de Danaan and Nemedians were descendants of the Japheth, Noah's other son. The Irish authors were borrowing idea from another religion to develop their own myth.
Similarly, in the Arthurian-Grail legend borrowed Joseph of Arimathea, where Perceval or Galahad were said to be descendant of Joseph's nephew, and that the Grail was the dish, bowl or cup that Joseph caught Jesus' blood.
This is not unusual to borrow idea like a legend, myth or religion from another culture and using it elevate their own religion/myth or culture. Julius Caesar and Octavian (or Augustus Caesar as he was known later) believed that they were descendants of the Trojan hero, Aeneas. Alexander the Great believed that he was descendant of Achilles and Achilles' son, Neoptolemus or Pyrrhus, because there is a legend that Neoptolemus had settled in Epirus in northern Greece, after the Trojan War.
Even today, there are some people claiming to be of the lines of King Arthur or other such personages.
Similarly, Jesus or the gospel authors, claimed that Jesus was descendant of David, and Muhammad being the descendant of Ishmael. The need to link their lines with someone great, is to elevate their positions, as well as stroke their egos...and of course, propaganda.
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Levite
Higher and Higher
If, indeed, the New Testament record was uncontested at the time of its writing, it was only because most Jews had not read it or heard of it. There are no records of any Perushim, much less any priests, joining the church. The idea that they would do so is ridiculous. Christianity was a tiny fringe movement, and remained so until it gathered strength of numbers by recruiting non-Jews.
There are indeed a number of polemical and made-up stories in Jewish literature about Jesus. All of which date to long, long after Jesus' lifetime, or the lifetime of any of his disciples.
Word of Jesus through the Roman empire didn't become widespread until after Paul, which is also when Christianity became entirely severed from Judaism, and became a religion of non-Jews.
There is, however, not a shred of legitimate or reliable evidence to suggest that any plurality of Jews were at all familiar with Jesus or the writings of the proto-Christian church, until at minimum after the lifetime of the apostate Paul.
The only documents that seem to indicate immediate widespread knowledge of Jesus are the scriptures of the Christian church, which, given that such an idea is doctrinally foundational for Christianity's presentation of Jesus as messiah and god, have no historical reliability in such matters.
Christianity is an Abrahamic religion because its founding figure was a Jew, and it took its foundational scriptures from the Jews. However, that does not mean that any of the Christological interpretations of Jewish scripture are authentic exegesis. There has never been any significant doubt ever raised in the Jewish tradition over whether the Christian interpretations are heretical or not: the only Jews to ever doubt they were heretical were apostates who became Christians.
Christian interpretations are entirely permissible if one reads as a Christian. But that has no relevance to their status if one reads as a Jew.
For some reason, Christianity just can't seem to wrap its head around the idea that just because they have embraced a theology of supercessionism, that doesn't affect the realities of pre-Christian history, or the realities of Jewish tradition and belief.
Shermana
Heretic
Christianity claims that Christ was the Son of God and that this is the only true path to follow.
Judaism does not recognise Jesus as being the Son yet the Jews are the chosen people.
Both religions share the same God - therefore one religion must be wrong, right?
This is like some kind of religious paradox.
The problem is the Pauline doctrines of Christianity. When you take Paul out of the picture and go by Jesus' words alone, you get Torah-ism. "Judaism" is more or less "Rabbinicism", the misconceptions about Yashua and what exactly the Messianic prophecies are and their context is what gets in the way, and the "Christians" (aka Paulines) who practice the post 2nd century "Gentile" forms of "Christianity" which have little to do with Jesus' actual teachings (not to mention the Trinity and Modalism which turn the Moshiach into G-d himself, heretically) distort the message. Most "Christians" (Paulines) like to skip over 1 John for example, which calls those who refuse to obey the commandments while claiming to know Christ "Liars".
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Heathen Hammer
Nope, you're still wrong
The Jews can say, since they know the prophecies. God gave them to them, after all.